An amalgam of mythopoetic fragments woven into a narrative thread, Becoming the Sound of Bees assembles
time in a triage of moments via the life of a shell-shocked wayfarer named
Ivan. The individual poems here are integral parts comprising a narrated
synergy that strives to recombine and recover Ivan’s personal gestalt: “It is a
fractured cinematic narrative where scenes saturate one another and characters
shift and exchange faces, some of which are our own” (Jake Berry).

Ivan is the Everyman, even as he is a protagonist with no heroics
attached. The Everyman character in the text is shadowed by the
narrator/commentator, allowing us to break through the fourth wall, that
semi-porous membrane that covers our shared meldings with Ivan. The voice is
omnipresent in this story, which also allows us as readers to project ourselves into Ivan’s wounded core; into the
evocative imagery of these beach scenes; and most certainly, into his process
of transmorphing himself while he uses his pain as the fuel to keep going in
this shattered world of his.

We too are
mythology … to live again transmorphed.

One wonders if Ivan might be a former academic, one who has
experienced some form of life-shattering breakdown. Has he lost a child named
Max? Has his wife also died? Or both, through some vicissitude of fate? He
apparently no longer makes sense as he wanders through the dystopian scapes of
his life on the beach, acquiring the detritus offered up by the oceanic tides.
His prowess in the art of beachcombing, however, is immense and all-consuming.

Living in a ramshackle bivouac above a slough, composed and held
together by civilization’s washed up debris, his is a cobbled-together
beachcomber’s shack where he boils seawater for stews of invertebrates and
kelp. He has chosen this spot on the bluff above the beach for access to the
tides and what gets brought forth nightly. In a parallel way, his own personal
tide coalesces with the oceanic tide, that giver of flotsam, existential
knickknacks, and ephemeral trash.

Ivan, King of the Seaweeds, this exile from civilization, has become a
bottle cap hoarder, nailing them to the south wall of his shack with any rusty
sharp thing he can find. “Twist the Cap” has become his mantra. He is Ivan the
Geomancer, pursuing auguries through this mythopoetic journey by the sea,
drinking a psychotropic broth from a plastic bucket, which sources his
hallucinatory episodes while a grey thrush chirps out fresh bird language as
Ivan mimics its song. He and his commentator traipse up and down the beach,
observing “the curious cacti on the hills,” Ivan soldiering his way on through
his presumed PTSD hours, stumbling forth like one of Cormac McCarthy’s
traumatized characters. Malcolm Lowry, another famous beachcomber, who
sheltered up in a seaside bivouac in British Columbia, exiled from a world too
wounding to live in, also comes to mind here.

Yet, given all this, we still want to know who this Ivan really is,
this hoarder of memories, akin to Beckett’s Molloy
perhaps, that outcast who hoards his sucking stones in a lonely sea cave.
Ivan the beachcomber, with a loose rope belt such that he has to keep hitching
up his odoriferous threadbare trousers, screams “blue at the sea” -- “I’m the
You!” he yells as he angles with his makeshift spear. He is a recorder of
“illusions and smoke-knowledge,” indicating that “smoke is our umbilical cord …
to the dark deities.” Perhaps through his scribbled metaphors, a possible
redemption/salvation is being generated while he traipses across the silent
desolate sands.

Also, referencing any possible absence of bees, apparently it is now
us doing the buzzing. Yet how do we become, or even incorporate, the sound of
the bees? Especially the buzzing sound, as defined in the word bombinate: to rumble, buzz, hum, or
produce a low boom. The continuous sound of the surf that Ivan absorbs with
each daily cycle may echo the symbolic sound of the bombination of bees. Or
internally, there is the systole/diastole oscillation of this pulsing life, the
sound of the blood as it expands and contracts through his cranium. Through
this process of transmorphing that
Vincenz alludes to throughout this text, perhaps this gives us a clue about the
imminent peril that we as residents of earth now find ourselves in.

While in the pregnant silences heard at noon, that is the noon that
until recently was endowed with the low hum of apian industry, this quiet may
fill the entirety of our empty days ahead. And yet this narrative, as
loaded as it is with the metaphorical associations of hope, warns us about more
than the demise of bees. Through poetic language that goes kaleidoscopic in Becoming The Sound Of Bees, we are
given a sketch of what our future might become, whether we choose to heed it or
not.

Certainly the exuberant forces exhibited by Vincenz’s imagination,
erupting forth like Pele’s magma flowing into the Hawaiian seas, is palpably
apparent in these poems, an igneous fluidity that depicts a human tragedy
through the existential aftermath of coping with traumatic loss. One thinks of
Berryman’s Henry, another soul who
has suffered an irreversible loss like Ivan, proceeding through the minefields
of self-alienation and depression.

As one reads through these poems, it is striking how Vincenz has this
great gift for working his language into such evocative imagery, his penchant
for the scholarly blending with the quotidian, driving the transformative
thematics throughout these poems. This book serves to remind us that breakdowns
in our consciousness can also serve as breakthroughs; we will prevail only with
the integrity of our fellow apian creatures if we do not succumb to despair,
and proceed with hope and desire towards interpersonal wholeness.

Residing in the southern
part of Northern California, Matt Hill is a sculptor, poet, and fiction
writer. His poetry, prose, and short fictions can be found on many Internet
venues, including BlazeVox Books, Argotist ebooks, and Gradient Books.